[ronjouch]

If you like Ardour, consider a monthly donation! As other mentioned, it's a longtime work of Paul Davis and a close-knit community. Paul works full-time on Ardour thanks to these donations.

See "Finance" sidebar at https://community.ardour.org/community

[badosu]

Another contributor that is even at least as active, in Ardour and the general Linux Audio community, is Robin Gareus (rgareus, x42) [0].

[0]: http://gareus.org/

[ronjouch]

Yes! I wasn't trying to put Paul on a pedestal, only pointing out he hacks full-time on Ardour and the way donations (currently) work is that money goes to him for this.

[badosu]

I just thought worth mentioning, I am not aware how donations work today.

[jordigh]

Didn't Ardour use to sell binaries? I was looking at it a while ago for inspiration on how to make money for Octave. Have they switched to a monthly subscription donation service?

[ristic]

If you follow the "Ready-to-Run Program" prompts on the official download page[1] as an anonymous or unsubscribed user, you will reach a page that explains their method/philosophy.

I'm sure Paul would be happy to speak to you on IRC (#ardour on Freenode) about successes/failures but of course I can't say this for sure.

Also, I am awaiting a stream of Paul's upcoming talk (as I can't get to France for LAC2017[2]) "20 years of Open Source Audio: Success, Failure and The In-Between"[3]. I hope part of the talk will address the financial aspects that are of interest to you.

[1] https://community.ardour.org/download [2] http://musinf.univ-st-etienne.fr/lac2017GB.html [3] http://musinf.univ-st-etienne.fr/lac2017/lacProgramGB.html

[dec0dedab0de]

They still do. I've only ever used it within ubuntu studio though.